Revenge Of Rolling Pins, Warns Opposition's Ram Gopal Yadav On Notes Ban

New Delhi: Ram Gopal Yadav, opposition leader, advised the government today to send its ministers to a village soon. "The women, they will hit you on the head with a rolling pin," he said in parliament about public sentiment on the ban on 500 and 1,000 rupee notes.

Mr Yadav said that in villages and in cities, it is women, especially home-makers, who are left incapacitated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's sudden withdrawal last week of high denomination notes.

The government has said that in order for the crackdown on black money to be effective, the move had to be sudden, a claim backed by financial experts. The notes were invalid within hours of the PM's announcement, which meant that people were left stranded without cash, especially in rural areas.

Nearly 48 billion dollars have been deposited in the last week in banks, where people are waiting hours in line, some of them overnight, to collect the new Rs 500 and Rs 2,000 notes which are in short supply. Most ATMs across the country are still in the process of being recalibrated to be able to dispense the new notes, which are larger in dimension.

Mr Yadav heads the Samajwadi Party in the Rajya Sabha. As Uttar Pradesh gets ready to vote, the party has skidded into a deep turf war. Mr Yadav and Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav have teamed against Mulayam Singh, who heads the party and is the Chief Minister's father, and his younger brother, Shivpal Yadav.

Today's comments by the Samajwadi leader were made in an all-day debate which saw opposition parties accusing the government of failing to do its homework on how to manage the cash crunch that was certain to follow the move to demonetize.